Teacher beliefs about teaching French as a foreign language in a Chinese university: a multilingual perspective

Abstract

While French is an important European language being taught in Chinese universities, not much is known about French language teachers’ beliefs about its teaching as a foreign language, particularly not from a multilingual perspective. Adopting a multiple-case design, this study examined 5 French language teachers’ beliefs about the French language and the learner. Analysing data collected via interviews, the study revealed that teachers’ beliefs reflected neither the linguistic landscape of the French language nor the learner’s existing level of multilingualism. However, the teachers’ monolingual ideology as reflected in their beliefs seemed to co-exist with beliefs that reflected their multilingual ideology; the cultural capital brought by learning French as a foreign language prevailed in teachers’ beliefs about the language with reference to the value of French learning in their students’ future international communication in a multilingual world, and the teachers also perceived their students as French learners with English learning experience that could lend support to their French learning. FUNDING INFORMATION. This research was funded by “Research on the Innovation of Foreign Language Education in China” (grant number: 22JJD740011), a major project of the Key Research Institutes of Humanities and Social Sciences under the Ministry of Education, as well as supported by the Beijing Foreign Studies University “Double First-Class” Fund (project title: “Construction of Standards for Foreign Language Education and Foreign Language Talents Training in Higher Education”, project number: 2022SYLZD010).